68 - The Summer of the Massacre

    Not to be confused with The Summer of Massacre (2011).  This was a 2006 straight to video release.  You know, the cover for this movie is pretty good!  Sadly, this has a slightly lower rating on IMDB than Pool Party did.

    A group of teens get lost in the English countryside, and wind up being chased and killed by Hammer Head, a masked killer wielding a hammer.

    As this movie begins, there's an opening crawl.  All of this text is verbatim.

    Many films have been based
    on true-life crimes over as
    many decades as the crimes have
    been committed, such as Ted
    Bundy, Ed Gein: two of many
    famous killers.
    All films are truly harrowing
    piece's of film-making, able to
    terrify, unnerve and provoke
    emotions and thoughts that
    stay in the mind long after the
    tape has rewind, due to the
    true facts portrayed in the
    features.  But none as yet has
    been so near to the true horror's
    as The Summer of The Massacre's
    real life killer Hammer Head.
    Based on a real factual occurrences
    involving a malevolent monster
    called Hammer Head, whose form
    of life was cannibalism?
    This film is a true account of the
    savage and unabated blood lust,
    which befell four very young
    teenagers.  Four, who could nor
    would have expected such a mad &
    nightmarish events that day,
    which would scare the survivor for
    the rest of their living days…

    The scrolling speed of the text was actually a little too fast, considering how awkward the writing is.  I had to rewind and pause it in order to read.
    Then the movie starts up.
    And there's no budget.

    The movie seems to have been filmed with a handful of friends, I would estimate six of them (four on screen, one holding the camera, and one playing the killer).  There are no real sets.  The sound is entirely camera mounted.

    Let me go back to the beginning.  We open on a boy and girl walking in the woods.  She complains about how she doesn't want to go camping.  They gradually build up to an argument.  As he turns around to say something, a guy wearing a mask and holding a hammer jumps out of the woods and kills the guy.  The next five minutes or so is the girl running through the woods, screaming in almost every shot.  The characters seem to have a hard time navigating branches blocking the path.  At one point, the girl decides to stop screaming, and try hiding.  As soon as she sees the killer again, she resumes screaming.
    This was just the opening kill.

    The whole movie is like this.  Except that about the first half of it is setting things up, getting the main characters lost in the woods.  We have the crazy guy warning them to stay away.
    As I've mentioned, all of the sound seems to be from the camera microphone.  The sound doesn't reach the badness of Birdemic, but it's pretty fuzzy.  The cast all have heavy accents, and combined with the poor sound quality (and lack of subtitles) I had no idea what was being said most of the time.
    That didn't make any difference.

    This movie plays a lot like a cheap homage to Texas Chainsaw Massacre.  There isn't a particular plot, it's just about this event happening to a collection of people.  So all of that dialogue only existed to get a sense of these people being friends, and then argue about being lost.

    The second half of the movie is solidly just people running, screaming through the woods, being chased by the killer.  Some people get bound for a short time.  Whenever there's any combat between characters, it's clear that they don't touch each other.  At one point, a girl hits the killer with a severed limb.  You can hear the hilariously light slapping sound.

    Camera work is reasonable.  The lighting is passable.  For some reason, to show that the car is moving, they use close-ups on the tailpipe twice.

    This sounds like I really didn't like the movie.  While I wouldn't watch it again (except maybe the first 6 minutes) I actually felt like this was more of a high school project.  And as that, they did reasonably well.